Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Essay - Critical Essays

Edward Albee, one of the most distinguished American playwrights, wrote Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? when he was in his early thirties. The title highlights his concern with fictions and with the way they allay fears and become actual events in people’s lives. By substituting a bisexual feminist writer for a more generally threatening enemy, Albee confronts his audience with more pointed fears: Animal death still lurks behind the title, augmented by the bold and frightening challenges represented by Woolf’s honesty, experimentation, and suicide.

Albee’s great European predecessors, Luigi Pirandello, Samuel Beckett, and Eugène Ionesco, saw the fundamental absurdity of life. They destroyed surface presumptions by presenting as surface the underlying truths that people are characters searching for roles in an unwritten play (Pirandello’s Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore, 1921; Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1922), that they await deliverers who never come (Beckett’s En attendant Godot, 1952; Waiting for Godot, 1954), and that husbands and wives do not know each other (Ionesco’s La Cantatrice chauve, 1950; The Bald Soprano, 1956). Albee’s major American predecessors, Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller, were engaged in capturing human experience more realistically, using surreal techniques to help convey the deep psychology of their characters. In...

(The entire section is 569 words.)

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